New album from the creators of the platinum-selling The Trinity Session

Cowboy Junkies are ending the six-year wait for a new album with the July 13, 2018 release of All That Reckoning. It's the Toronto group's longest gap between albums so far, which guitarist and chief songwriter Michael Timmins told Billboard magazine wasn't by design.

"We were just working on different projects and different things," Timmins tells Billboard. He adds that the quartet was also well aware of how different music consumption is now than when Cowboy Junkies made its platinum splash 30 years ago with The Trinity Session.

""We've released a lot of records," Timmins explains, "and in the business climate the way it is today it becomes harder and more difficult to figure out why one does that besides for the art of it. And you can get that part of one's personality massaged by doing live shows and small projects. A whole album is a lot of work. You sort of begin to think, 'Does anybody care anymore?' But it's hard for us to think about singles or whatever format people are purporting to be the new way of putting out music. So if we're going to record, for us, it's going to be an album."

After accumulating a group of songs coming from both the personal and political side, Timmins says that "the artistic side took over" and the group hit its home studio to begin shaping All That Reckoning. "I think a lot of people are trying to figure out where we're headed in the world, where society is going, what's gonna come out the other end," Timmins says. "There's a lot of pressures and a lot of crumbling of institutions, very little foundation to put one's feet on again, especially at an older age. You sort of expect things to be there and realize, 'My God, what I thought was a standard, whether it be an institution or a way of dealing with people in our society, is disappearing.'"